COWAP

COWAP-N.A. PRESENTS AN EXHIBIT OF ART ABOUT ABORTION AND ABORTION RIGHTS: Images reflecting women’s despair and anger at the fear of losing reproductive rights

Art can express visually what cannot be expressed in words. Artists can articulate unconscious meanings and thoughts in deeper ways. Often traumatic events infused with hatred and sadism are too difficult to represent and communicate. Psychoanalysts see communication spaces opening when metaphor is created. Artists, like dreamers, offer the symbols that bridge the chasm to the unknown in our minds and in our cultures.

Viewing our gallery brings understanding of feelings concerning women having control over their own bodies, and the horrors at losing that control with unwanted pregnancy. Abortion as choice is now forbidden in many places, made illegal, and many women are in agony about losing control of their bodies, their lives, their destiny. The actualities intersect with the deepest unconscious fantasies involving female genital anxieties linked to fear that being alive and creative will be punished. The artwork here defies these fears showing resilience and determination to know and symbolize.

Some of these images are shocking. We can talk about uncomfortable things but often detach from visualizing them. Here, the viewer is made to look at the actual female body, the female genitalia, rather than to intellectually think about it. These images arouse in us conflicts over castration. Medusa’s head of snakes (symbolizing the vagina) turned men to stone when looking. These images arouse conflicts overlooking, over voyeurism. They arouse feelings about women’s bodies as being “abject”, as Julia Kristeva noted, exuding fluids and fetuses that arouse disgust and contempt.

Depriving women of the right to abortion, to have control over their bodies and lives, is violence.